The women’s joyous laughter is unexpected.
It overlaps the spirited conversations, filling the small room during the Women’s Wisdom Project, which offers time and free art materials to low-income women.
The project was started in May by the People’s Resource Center, a non-profit social service agency. It is patterned after a similar program in Sacramento.
The laughter makes 36-year-old Kathy’s soft voice barely audible.
“In the beginning of today’s meeting we each wrote a short sentence on how we felt and I wrote that today I’m feeling like a distant ocean. But I don’t know if it’s something I can put into words,” she says as she highlights small triangles penciled in her sketchbook, slowly creating sailboats.
“There are a lot of things going on in my life, so many external and internal sources, things are on my mind and I feel kind of distant. And I love the ocean, it’s kind of mysterious,” she adds.
Rosie Dixon, an artist and one of the center’s volunteer board members, says, “Our mission is to create a peer group of women with no distinctions between one another, a community.
“We’re not talking about a support group or art therapy, but a community of women who feel comfortable with one another, that actually do support one another and care for one another and feel that they can grow in an atmosphere that is totally open and they can feel free to be whoever they are.”
The dozen or so women face one another from the desks lining the walls of the room. Each has a sketchbook, and after some minimal guidance from a volunteer art instructor, each creates drawings by repeating several marks of her choosing, such as Kathy’s triangles and spirals. Colorful fragments are cut out by some of the women from magazine pages and decoupaged onto their drawings. One woman paints the swan-shaped trays she has created of aluminum foil and masking tape. Another needlepoints.
“I think that there are things that we can discover about ourselves through art,” says Dixon. “It touches the really deep part of ourselves that we cover over in our daily lives.”
